Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and coeditor of
Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington and coeditor of
Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and coeditor of
Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington and coeditor of
Justice and Its Doubles: Producing Postwar Responsibilities in Sierra Leone
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Published:March 2017
Rosalind Shaw, 2017. "Justice and Its Doubles: Producing Postwar Responsibilities in Sierra Leone", Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle
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Following a devastating civil war, in 2002 Sierra Leone became a laboratory for justice. For the first time, a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) and a semi-international criminal court operated side by side. But in the context of eleven years of war, a thirty-year legacy of state violence, ongoing structural violence, and deeper memories of colonial rule and slave trades, this justice experiment generated a potentially dangerous doubling of the relationship among verbal testimony, responsibility, and accountability. I explore this doubling and its consequences through two widespread but marginalized forms of knowledge and practice that emerged in the Sierra Leone laboratory: first, rumors connecting the Special Court and the TRC as treacherous doubles with hidden capacities; and second, the embodied performance of apologies before the TRC. Both of these forms recast the responsibility-generating machinery of the Special Court and TRC, decoupling them from the model of liberal progress on which they were based.
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